


What Happens At Conference

by Britpacker



Category: The Thick of It (TV)
Genre: Established Relationship, F/M, Original Character(s), Secret Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-08
Updated: 2013-11-08
Packaged: 2017-12-31 14:57:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1033028
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Britpacker/pseuds/Britpacker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stays at Conference.  Even when, technically, it doesn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. After The P.M's Show

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by a comment in the DVD commentary of the conference episode during Series 3 about a political golden rule.

“One more day then it’s all over for another fucking year.”

The moment they entered the hotel’s creaking lift all the energy seemed to leak out of him. If she didn’t know he would recharge before they reached the top floor, Sam Cassidy would have been really worried. Nobody – well, nobody else – was allowed to see Malcolm Tucker flag for a so much as a millisecond.

There again nobody else would dare stretch up and ruffle the thick hair, mostly dark brown waves when she had first entered his office, closer-cropped now and entirely a glistening silvery grey. Nor brush their lips against his cheek, drawing them in a feathery line to tickle his earlobe. “And the delegates all think you’ve been having such a fabulous time,” she whispered. 

He sighed, actually swaying into her caress. “Yeah, well, the boss is shit at this personal interaction bollocks, in case you hadn’t fucking noticed. Somebody’s got to make the grassroots feel appreciated, right?”

“Mmmm.” He’d never admit it but Sam suspected he enjoyed all that shit; dealing with real people who bought their own bread and went to the pub on a Friday night, charming the ladies and talking football with the men. These people weren’t afraid of him – not after the first smile, the initial _putting-you-at-your-ease_ joke. The terrible reputation of the most vicious shark in the Westminster tank dissipated like the smoke of all those cigarettes on the seafront – the only place, she’d heard delegates complain, they were actually allowed to light up nowadays – and for short breaks at a time Malcolm Tucker could forget about scaring seven shades of multicoloured shit out of people and just _be_.

Tonight, however, had not been like the rest of conference. Tonight had been the Prime Minister’s reception, the chance for the big hitters of the party to ingratiate themselves with established backers and potential donors alike; to see and be seen. Hence Malcolm’s immaculate dinner jacket and bow tie; hence Sam’s elegant little black cocktail dress and precipitously heeled shiny shoes. 

Hence the dull thud of a headache hovering behind her – and she guessed his – gritty eyes.

The Director of Communications had to stay vigilant to the bitter end, long after the Prime Minister had made his own getaway to the accompaniment of applause and flashbulbs. Every news organisation in the country was present, all waiting for a Cabinet Minister to be offered a bribe within earshot – or so he insisted, and she wasn’t naïve enough anymore to assume he was just being paranoid. Now, past midnight and having been on parade since seven, he had every right to sag, letting his tired eyes drift shut while the most personal of personal assistants eased herself into his intimate space and curled her hands around his cramped shoulders.

Whether he needed it or not, Sam decided when her fingers worked their way into tight muscles, she definitely did. Spending eighteen hours a day beside him without being able to touch – that was the greatest torment the red-hot poker of British politics could inflict on anyone.

Whatever the victims of his more dramatic tirades might say.

The lift shuddered, its doors creaking like a jackdaw’s throat as they juddered apart. Without any prompting from her brain, the hands around his shoulders gripped harder.  


Malcolm jerked forward, his chin snapped up off his chest. “Sam…”

“Shush.” The button was in just the right position for her to re-close the doors without releasing both hands. Sam pushed up onto her toes, throwing her full weight forward into his chest.

Unprepared, Malcolm staggered until his spine connected with the back wall. “Hey!”

Any further protest was stopped by the simple expedient of slipping her tongue past his teeth and swiping lasciviously down into his throat. Something else, it occurred to her, that nobody else would consider trying in the face of the dreaded enforcer’s objections.

“Jesus, woman!” A touch of colour had returned to his cheek by the time he broke free, a little breathless and more than slightly turned on, as evidenced by the pressure Sam could feel growing against her belly. “What’re you….”

She hadn’t planned it. She understood his objections. But now, locked in a metal box with his erection starting to swell and her temperature beginning to rise, she couldn’t think of anything else. “I want you. Now.”

One steely brow twitched. “Here?”

Her quiver of laughter passed like an electrical current into him through every point of bodily contact. “If you’re game.”

“For fuck’s sake, Sam!” His body betrayed him every time, moving against hers despite the exertion of all his formidable willpower. “We’re in a fucking hotel full of press and party, what’re you fuckin’ playing at, girl?”

“I’m not playing.” Breathing the words right into his ear had the desired effect; his whole body seemed to ripple in a desperate effort to get closer to hers. “Your place or mine?”

“Get out of the fucking lift.”

Anyone else might have assumed the words were grated in anger; most of the world assumed that was his habitual state. Careful to hold herself mere millimetres in front of him, a human shield between his aroused condition and prying eyes, Sam allowed herself the beginnings of a satisfied smile.

With a hand just beneath her elbow he guided her at top speed along the deserted corridor to his door, his erection lightly butting her derriere while he fumbled with the complicated combination of exhaustion, locks, keys and sexual anticipation. A low purr escaping her throat, she ground herself back against him.

Opening the door got a whole lot harder: and it wasn’t, Malcolm considered, savage exultation roaring through his bloodstream, the only thing.

She rolled into his arms as they entered his bedroom, pressing her breasts into his chest, her head thrown back, lips already puckered and parted, inviting his kiss. “Jesus, woman!” he growled, torn between the natural desire to throw her back on the bed and give the brazen hussy the shagging she thoroughly deserved, and the political necessity of not doing precisely that. “Can you no’ control your fuckin’ libido for one fucking week?”

“No.” Her lips smacked over the word, savouring it like a naughty child. When he would have pushed her away – gently, not even in his current dazed condition would he ever manhandle her – Sam wound her hands into the quality fabric of his expensive dinner jacket and hung on, keeping up the pressure on his lower portions. Eyes wild, visibly agitated, Malcolm squirmed away.

“Damn it, lass! I’ve got the P.M. on one side and that polished poof Nicholson on the other, and don’t you know these places have walls made of wet fucking paper?” he gasped, yanking off his bow tie in a futile attempt to take in some more air. 

The effect, she noticed, was to make him that little bit more dishevelled, and even more fucking desirable. When he was in a more appreciative mood, maybe she’d tell him that. 

“Well you’ll just have to keep your voice down when you come then, won’t you?” She smirked, taking advantage of the loosening of his collar to attach her mouth to the sensitive spot at the side of his neck, braced for the inevitable weakening of his knees. Her tongue feathered, sweeping up the salt taste of a hard day’s sweat.

His wasn’t the only head beginning to spin.

“What happens at conference stays at conference, yes?” she cooed, keeping him off balance with a hand in his hair while pouring the golden rule recognised by all parties into his ear. Malcolm groaned.

“That’s the fucking point! You’re not some convenience fuck, lass. I wouldn’t want anyone to get the idea...”

“Nobody needs to know.” It was twisted logic, but Sam understood. In his own way, he was trying to protect her.

Well, she was a big girl now. He of all people should know that.

And if he didn’t, she was presently in the ideal position to remind him.

Her mouth reattached itself to his, the fingers not already preoccupied mussing his hair slithering toward an even more sensitive target way to the south. Malcolm hissed softly, the sound vibrating against her tongue. 

Just a little more. The slightest increase in pressure, the lightest squeeze of a tender ball, the touch of her tongue tip to the roof of his mouth, and he would be hers.

Exultation flooded her, making Sam rash. She ground against him; got one hand inside his jacket, rubbing his back through the flimsiness of his snowy shirt. “Please, Malcolm,” she whimpered. “Need you.”

“Fuck!”

The familiar profanity was all she needed. With a violence neither of them had suspected her capable of Sam shoved her lover back until he sprawled on the bed, then threw herself at him before he could gather his wits enough to move.

“Got tae keep it quiet, yeah?” he growled, his accent broadening deliciously as it always did in passion’s grip. The thump of her left shoe hitting the floor made them both guffaw like guilty schoolboys. Sam nipped his jugular. Hard.

Malcolm yelped. One large, graceful hand found its way into the elegant pile of her carefully arranged hair, twisting the pins free and sending them in a painful scatter across the bed. When her arse connected with the point of one Sam decided she quite liked the unexpected little stimulus created.

“Fuck, you’re gorgeous.” His words were gasped out while they wriggled and writhed their way out of unwanted clothes, every unexpected bump and brush causing another knot of need to tighten in Sam’s stomach. What had begun as a girlish game – let’s seduce the mighty Malcolm Tucker against his will – had become something much, much more serious.

Her fingers curled around his cock, finding the pressure point just below the head that always sent him into orbit. “Inside me,” she begged him, her head threshing across the pillows, sweaty hair sticking to her glowing face. “Please, Malcolm!”

His index finger slipped between her folds and his passion-glazed eyes widened. “Jesus you’re so fuckin’ _wet_ ,” he half-moaned, probing her deeper while she bucked beneath him, her inner walls clenched around the slender intrusion. Her giggle came out strangled.

“All – your fault.” His fingers moved relentlessly, finding her softest spots and working them until she was breathless, mindless and utterly incoherent. When he removed them and held them up before her eyes, lasciviously slurping the hand clean of her juices with his tongue, Sam could have come on the spot.

She didn’t, because he didn’t give her the time. The whole weight of his lean body came to rest on her while he thrust his way home in a smooth, firm stroke that had her squealing, her limbs clamping convulsively to hold him in place. Dimly she was aware of his voice, gravelled and hoarse, muttering a uniquely _Malcolm_ mix of endearment, encouragement and expletive against her ear, the litany fracturing as every thrust carried them closer, the pleasure building until it consumed her and on a mighty cry of his name, Sam came.

She was aware of his stiffening; of the moment’s stillness before he followed her over the edge, his groan muted against her neck while his release began to pulse, each powerful spurt triggering another small shockwave within her. Sam clutched him with what little remained of her strength, keeping her eyes tight shut while the world slowly re-formed around her.

What brought her back to it was the sweetest sound she knew; Malcolm’s soft purr of contentment, emitted every time he felt his flaccid length slide free of her cloying heat. Almost without effort they shifted into their usual position, she tucked up in the crook of his arm, his fingers smoothing idly over her belly. “So much for keepin’ the noise down,” he sighed.

“Your fault for being so good at this.” She licked the smooth skin of his shoulder, letting her tongue tip linger at the point it joined his neck and wiggling it experimentally. When the faintest shimmer of silent laughter passed through him, she did it again. “D’ you think Julius will be jealous?”

He smothered his guffaw in her tumbled hair. “I hate to disappoint you darlin’ but I don’t think you’re his type.”

Sam heaved herself up to peer down into his shining silvery eyes. “What makes you think I mean jealous of you?”

“For fuck’s sake!” At close quarters even his amused expostulations could be scary, unless you knew him as well as she. “Jesus Christ! Now how am I gonna disinfect my poor wee brain of _that_ nasty thought, eh?”

She hadn’t been his personal assistant for three years without learning to read his smallest hints. Gently, Sam lowered her face to his and delivered a long, slow kiss to her sleepy lover’s mouth, waiting until his pleasured purr began to vibrate against her tongue. “That help?” she whispered, surprised as she always was by how smoky, how sexy, she always sounded after snogging him breathless.

“A bit.” Not that she’d ever sound half as gravelly seductive as him. That voice, his weapon against the world, was even more potent in the bedroom, not that he’d ever believe it. “You’d better stay a while, though. I might need protectin’ from that talentless bald Liberace, right?”

“Your arse is safe in my hands.” She reared up at him, all nails and flashing teeth in the moonlight. Malcolm chuckled.

Sexily, she noticed. Was there a bloody thing the man could do she didn’t find attractive?

Not in the middle of the night, her body still humming with recent pleasure. Planting a soft kiss against his cheek, she snuggled her face into the side of his neck, closed her eyes and succumbed to sleep.


	2. The Morning After

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He knew it was a risk. How much of a risk Malcolm's about to find out...

The dull red glow from the bedside radio alarm read 5:44 when she tiptoed out into the unlit hallway, shoes in one hand and hairpins clutched in the other. Her gown gaped at the back, the zipper pulled just high enough to shield her arse from any early morning wanderer, and Malcolm couldn’t quite drag his eyes away from the creamy V of soft skin the fabric left exposed. Too wide-awake to crawl back into sheets that smelled of Sam and sex at an hour too early to be appearing for breakfast, he settled for ogling his gorgeous young lover until she reached a bend in the hall and, with a last blown kiss his way, disappeared in the direction of her own small single room.

He opened the windows wide, sucking in a deep breath of chilly sea air even as its briny tang began to dissipate the lingering scent of their activities. A long, luxurious shower would kill some time; then there were the morning’s headlines to check. The glossy – and wildly inaccurate – literature on his bedside cabinet claimed breakfast would be available from 6:30 onwards. Maybe this was the day to test that out.

He wasn’t sure which of them was more surprised; the single pretty blonde waitress startled from her Kindle or the guest offered newspapers with his coffee and toast one minute before service was due to start. “If you need a refill or anything, sir, just give me a shout,” she told him cheerfully. “I’m only on ‘til seven and I don’t usually get to serve a soul! We’ve got blackcurrant or raspberry jam somewhere too, if you’d prefer…”

“Thanks darlin’ marmalade’s fine, you enjoy your book.” Morning people. Few seaside hotels, in his experience, employed them. “Anything good?”

“ _Wolf Hall_. I’m almost through it in a week. Have you…”

“A friend has; she says the sequel’s even better.”

“I’m buying that next pay day.” Her voice dropped confidentially. “I’m not supposed to have it out on duty, but…”

“I didn’t see a thing.” One long finger against the side of his nose Malcolm winked, taking a careful squint at the name badge on her smart white apron. “Thank you, Jenny.”

Colouring prettily she put the full coffee pot down at his side. He’d just had time to drain it when an unmistakable hubbub in the lobby announced the imminent arrival of the Harrisons and the end of his peace and quiet for the day. 

Sophie waved to him on her way to the cereal bar. Her husband ignored the line of hotel management all jostling around the wide double doors and lunged straight across the room toward Malcolm’s table, one hand already outstretched to clasp the taller man’s as he rose, all formality, to greet his boss.

“Morning, Prime Minister.” 

“Oh fuck that, you old stoat.” Grinning hugely, Nick Harrison stretched over the table while pumping the Scot’s hand. “I assume you _did_ check her credentials?”

“Sorry?” Fake innocence wasn’t likely to work: it wasn’t often the P.M. got to goad his enforcer and with a sinking heart Malcolm steeled himself for the inevitable heavy-handed joshing. 

“Your _visitor_ last night, Malc; no, don’t play dumb, that was one _very_ satisfied customer from what I was hearing, you randy bastard! Not going to scuttle back to her constituency and start bragging about her conquest, is she? _What happens at conference_ and all that crap won’t wash with the hacks if they get a sniff of scandal around you.”

“Scandal?” In spite of - or perhaps because of - the cold lump in his guts, Malcolm laughed. “Divorced man has shag in seaside hotel. Jesus, if that’s their idea of a fuckin’ scandal now I’ve been doing my fucking job too well!”

“Divorced man who’s terrorised the press for the past decade,” the Prime Minister corrected solemnly. “It’d make their fucking year to have a nice little Puritanical pop at you!”

“Trust me Boss, there’ll be no headlines. I’m not Education Secretary, am I?”

“No,” Harrison agreed ruefully. “Although I sometimes wish you were; their policy documents _would_ at least be spelled properly before we publish them.”

He knew it turned heads when he laughed, but Malcolm couldn’t help himself. “I did send a step-by-step guide to using the fucking spell-checker after the last one,” he said soothingly. “It’s just a pity they’re all illiterate over there.”

“We can blame that on the previous government, yeah?”

“If they didn’t educate the bastards, they fuckin’ employed them. Morning, Sophie.”

“Malcolm.” She presented her cheek. Half-rising out of his seat, Malcolm brushed his lips across it. “Nick, _please_ go and get your breakfast; the restaurant manager won’t leave until he knows the eggs are OK and I’m sure he’s bursting for the loo.”

Her husband hesitated, shooting a hopeful glance across the table. Malcolm shook his head.

“Oh all right, spoil my fun, why don’t you?” the Prime Minister chortled loudly, leaning over to slap his Director of Communications hard on the shoulder, noisy cover for a sombre exchange. “Seriously though, Malc. I know how you hate the thought of becoming the story…”

“It won’t happen. Trust me.”

“Let him alone, Nick.” Mrs Harrison squeezed her husband’s arm, subtly diverting him toward the serving counter and the line of eager staff awaiting his notice. “I’m sorry, Malcolm,” she added more quietly, satisfied attention had been diverted from their corner table. “I did try to dissuade him, but don’t worry; I haven’t told him.”

He froze. “Told him what?” Malcolm croaked, remembering what _fear_ felt like for the first time in years. The thin face before him lit with the sweetest of smiles.

“Who your lady friend was, of course. I’ve known for a while Sam has a soft spot for you.” While he goggled, mouth hanging open like a stunned cod’s – or a Cabinet Minister’s, he amended, snapping his jaws together so hard his teeth hurt – Sophie Harrison leaned over the table to plant a sisterly peck on his cheek. “She’s a lovely young woman, by the way. It’s about time you remembered there’s a life outside politics.”

“Coming from you lass, that’s almost funny.” They had, Malcolm considered (not for the first time) the wrong Harrison running the country. If Nick had a fraction of his wife’s innate understanding…

He wouldn’t be able to do his job. 

He watched an excited knot of waiters, kitchen staff and chambermaids queuing up to shake the hands of the Prime Ministerial pair and allowed himself a slight, rueful smile. 

Sophie Harrison was a sweet, thoughtful human being. No politician got as far as the local council chamber by being like that.

She was also, he knew, discreet; again, not a common trait in senior politicians. And she knew the rules.

What happened at conference, stayed at conference. Even when – he acknowledged with a stuttering heart-rate as his delectable lover strolled into the cavernous dining room – it didn’t.


End file.
